Finality
by SeeMeInTheShadows
Summary: It's the end of an era and they've all fallen apart.


A/N: This is for the always lovely and extraordinarily talented lemonsdarlings, who I happen to love. It's her birthday so I whipped this up for her. It's kind of playing with the idea that they've all kind of forgotten about Lyoko, in a very Susan Pevensie-esque way, I suppose. I have several headcanons that I reference and the format is kind of weird, so if you have any questions or comments (or just want to hash out theories), feel free to review or PM or smoke-signal me. Thanks!

* * *

She has long red hair, most laying straight with one single braid falling on her left side. She has thick-framed glasses and bright green eyes. The hair and the eyes stand out against her outfit: black flats, dark jeans, and a loose, light grey shirt. She reminds him of Milly, including a pencil tucked over one ear and a notebook in her hand.

"Mr. Della Robbia?" she cautions.

"Yeh huh," he grunts. "That's me; the one and only." (Technically speaking, this is a lie. His father is still alive, acting in films and plays and TV shows. But really, his father doesn't go by Mr. Della Robbia either.) He's hosting a little art show and all around him, he can see paintings and drawings from his newest collection. He's proud of them, even if they bring back a bit of nostalgia that seems out of place.

"Hi," the girls says. She smiled. "I just want to say that I really, really enjoy your artwork. If you don't mind my asking, where did you get the inspiration for it?"

Odd shrugs and laughs and runs a hand through his hair that is now short and which does not contain even a hint of purple. "It was just a game my friends and I used to play."

* * *

Sometimes, Odd still dreams about Lyoko. He dreams about the Desert Sector, how even though he couldn't _feel_ in the traditional way, he could still sense the exhausting heat, the dry wind, the utter stillness. Sometimes he thinks about the Forest Sector, its sense of mystery and calmness. Ice's adventure and the bitter, numbing coldness. Mountain's beauty and anticipation. And it's sound. The sound of waves roaring beneath them, somehow amplified and the screaming wind and how it was always cold, but a different kind of cold than the Ice Sector.

He thinks about how different Sector Five was, like a Picasso. Smashed together and unexpected.

He wakes up and he remembers how _real_ it felt and then shakes himself out of it. He's always liked to think of it as if it were real, but he knows better. Lyoko was just a game.

Yet, those days that he dreams and remembers, he finds he can never get back sleep.

* * *

"That must have been some game," the girl says.

"It was," Odd agrees smoothly. "It really helped keep us together. My friends and I played it pretty much the entire time we were in junior high." He laughs. "Those were some good times."

She nods. "Still, that seems like an awfully long time ago to remember something, let alone draw it. How did you get inspiration for what it would actually look like?"

"I've always had an overactive imagination." He gives her a one thousand watt smile and she hesitatingly smiles back at him.

* * *

He's pounding on her door in the pouring rain. Overhead, thunder rumbles and lightning flashes and he can hear the sounds of cars passing outside, see their headlights illuminate the house for a split second before he's plunged into darkness with only the meager porch light to see.

Finally, the door slowly opens up and he sees Aelita. She looks him up and down before her face breaks out into a wary smile. "Come in, Odd," she says, not unkindly, and her smiles widens a bit. "We don't want you getting pneumonia."

Odd steps in and takes his shoes and jacket off, throwing them to the side of the door. Aelita walks further into the house, and he follows her into a nice, beige kitchen. She heats up water, throws a tea bag in, and hands it to him. He sips slowly- the water is too warm and burns his tongue and lips.

"So, to what do I owe this pleasure?"

Aelita has changed since Kadic. Pink still seems to be her color, but not the pale, innocent pink of Kadic and the neon pink of her DJing career. She wears shades of pink makeup in the middle, like she's hinting at innocence and then something more. (It's very seductive, he's not embarrassed to admit.) Her hair is a bit longer, and a lot straighter. It's also blonde.

"I don't know," Odd admits. "It's just, I'm having a hard time…you know, fitting in I guess."

She eyes the purple splotch in his hair (it's still there and nods). "I see."

Odd scowls and mock-punches her shoulder. "It's not that, it's just…no one really knows what we've been through, do they?"

"Of course not," Aelita points out. "No one knows everything about someone else's life."

"I'm not talking about that! I mean…Lyoko! They don't understand what it's like to have had that put on our shoulders for all those years."

At this point, Aelita is shaking her head. "Odd. Lyoko was fun. But it was just a game. None of it actually happened. You know that."

Odd puts the cup down and stands up. "How can you say that?" he whispers. "Lyoko was your HOME!"

"No, it wasn't! It wasn't my home because it didn't exist, Odd!" Aelita shouts. She takes a deep breath and calms down. "How much do you actually remember, anyway."

"Less and less each day," he admits.

"Exactly," Aelita says. "Just put it out of your mind. It was just a stupid game."

* * *

"What was the game?" the girl manages to ask.

"It was just a normal game," Odd answers. "It was the five of us against an evil enemy and we went to another place and saved the world. We used to use the abandoned factory by our school to play."

She nods solemnly and it's at this time that he actually takes time to look at her. Her hair is bright and she's tall, but she still looks young. Maybe about fifteen, give or take a few years. He had never been good at guessing ages. Something about her reminds him of himself when he was that age. Maybe the way she carried himself or stared at him or looked like she thought she was special.

* * *

One day he calls Yumi and he only gets an answering machine. The next day, he calls Yumi and he only gets an answering machine. He keeps calling until one day she picks up and says, "I don't want to talk about Lyoko, Odd."

She hangs up and they don't talk again.

Still, Odd isn't sure that Yumi ever stopped believing in Lyoko so much as she wished that she could. Wished that everything that happened didn't. Lyoko took more from her than anyone else in their group. Not only did she have to lie to her teachers, she had to feed a constant string of lies and half-truths to her _family._ She had to bear the knowledge that whatever XANA did would also affect them, they were so close to the action. And, quite frankly, if something bad were to happen on Earth, more often than not, she seemed to be stuck in the middle of it.

Lyoko had never been anything more than a responsibility to Yumi. It wasn't an escape like it was for Odd, or a home like for Aelita, a sense of purpose like for Jeremie, or the only thing in her life she could control like for Ulrich. It had been a burden and a source of nothing but betrayals and heartache and trauma and so it was easier to just let it go- pretend it didn't happen, even if somewhere in her mind she knew it did.

And Odd doesn't know if he can blame her for that.

* * *

The girl looks up and asks him one more question, and he can tell that this is the final one. "What if," she starts and gulps, "What if another group of kids start playing the game too? What would you suggest that they do?"

"It doesn't matter," Odd says. "It's just a game. Nothing they do can actually hurt anything."

The girl is glaring at him, green eyes flashing and forehead getting red. But when she speaks, her voice is deathly calm. "We thought that you could help us. We saw your drawings and thought that maybe you would understand. We don't know what to do."

There are tears in her eyes. He feels sorry for her, he really does, but he ignores them.

"Lyoko isn't real," he says to her. "And I can hardly remember it anyway."

She turns around a walks away without saying another word.

* * *

He isn't surprised when Ulrich stops believing, in all honestly. Once Jeremie had denied it, Odd knew it would only be a short while before Ulrich followed the Einstein on that path.

He just wishes that he had been wrong.

First, Ulrich stops talking about it, and then he refers to Lyoko with the type of nostalgia one uses when they recall stupid memories. _Remember that time I stepped in dog poop? Remember that time XANA almost won? Good times._

And then finally, he mentions that they should head to the factory some time, play another round of that "old game they used to play sometimes, you know, what was it called? The one with the different world. Cocoa? No…Lyoko! Yeah, that's it."

Time moves on. Ulrich focusses on soccer and bonds with the other members of his team. He starts studying and gets his grades up. He's still Odd's roommate and they're still best friends in name, they just don't do a lot beyond watching stupid movies, talking about girls, and playing video games.

Odd, Yumi, and Aelita hover together, more often than not, and they vow they won't forget. (They're lying.)

* * *

The next day, Odd sits at home and doesn't see the white light wash over the world, and he doesn't think that there's anything unusual when he's back at the art show and there's no girl with red hair, asking questions.

* * *

"It just doesn't make sense," Jeremie explains. "The law of conservation of mass. People can't just disappear into a computer, where would they go? And virtual reality? That's just not feasible with the technology available over ten years ago, it's not even feasible now!"

Once Jeremie gets that in his head, there's no changing his mind and they don't even think to try past the first few days. They see him eyeing brochures for elite high schools and they don't try to stop him from that either. Jeremie needed Lyoko when he had it, now that he doesn't, he's set his sights elsewhere. And it's not like any of them planned to stay together forever anyway. So they stop trying to bring up Lyoko around him.

And with that, Jeremie never thinks back to excessive hours spent in the factory again.

* * *

Two days after his art show, Odd gets a call from a frantic Jeremie. "I think Lyoko's real," he starts. "I think Lyoko's real and I think it's active again and I think that XANA is back. Listen, I was going through some of my old stuff and I was I figured I would convert the files from my laptop in case I had any good ideas back in the day that I would want to revisit now and the scanner came up. There was definitely a tower activated. I checked the news, something was definitely going down and then…" Jeremie trails off and when he begins speaking again, his voice is a whisper. "And then we returned to the past. I don't know how I haven't noticed it before. I think it's been so long that our immunity has worn off or _something_."

Odd sighs a longsuffering sigh. "Lyoko isn't real, Einstein. It's just something we made up when we were kids. You probably programmed the scanner to go off every so often and just never turned it off."

He hangs the phone up and when he goes to sleep, he can't even remember the way he could sense the Desert Sector's dry heat anymore.


End file.
